Month: December 2016

This interactive presentation contains the latest oil & gas production data from 65760 horizontal wells in 8 US states, through August. Cumulative oil production from these wells reached 5.8 Gbo, while cumulative gas production topped 48 TCF.

Oil production from these wells dropped significantly in August, as the Eagle Ford and the Bakken declined together by about 100 kbo/day. Gas production was stable at close to 35 BCF/day.

In the “Well quality” tab we can see the production curves for all these wells, averaged by the year in which they started production.

I’ve made the following change here: the thickness of the curves is now an indication for the number of wells that are included (the exact number of wells is shown in a tool tip if you click on a data point). My aim with this was to provide a visual cue of the relative weight of these curves. If you have a strong opinion about whether you like or dislike this change, please share it. We can see a thinning at the end of the tails, as not all the wells from that year have reached that particular age (in months on production).

All oil & gas basins are included, so if you want to see the performance of a subset of these wells, you can use the selections at the right side of the screen.

The status of these wells can be viewed in the “Well status” tab. Where more than 1400 new wells were put online in December 2014, since April this year the number of new well additions per month hovers around 400. Due to much fewer completions, average production from these wells has dropped as well. The bottom graph shows that almost 70% of these wells are now below 50 bo/d. Excluding the gas basins, this group still contains almost 60% of the wells.

The new ‘Advanced Insights’ presentation is displayed below:

This “Ultimate Return” overview shows the relationship between oil production rates (y-axis), and cumulative oil production (x-axis), averaged for all the wells that started production in a specific quarter. I’ve only selected the basins where oil production is dominant.

We can see nicely here that newer wells have higher initial production rates, and that this relationship between production rate & cumulative production after this period is remarkably similar as earlier wells.

Using the “Operator (current)” selection, you can view these ultimate return profiles for individual operators.

The last tab (“Gas Oil Ratio”) shows how gas production has changed relative to oil production. The blue graph in the bottom chart (the overall Gas Oil Ratio) shows that relative gas production was very high in early 2011, and after bottoming in early 2015, has moved upwards again.

For a more detailed description of these new overviews, please visit the first version of this advanced presentation for ND available here.

I always appreciate feedback on these presentations. So if you have any remarks, or find some of the overviews not intuitive, please let me know.

I’ve not yet planned a next post, and will update the text here once I do.

Production data is subject to revisions, especially for the last few months in Texas. These future revisions will eventually show up as an increase of a few % in total oil & gas production. For this presentation, I used data gathered from the following sources:

Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission

Montana Board of Oil and Gas

New Mexico Oil Conservation Commission

North Dakota Department of Natural Resources

Ohio Department of Natural Resources

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection

Texas Railroad Commission. Well profiles are estimated from well status & lease production data, as individual well production data is not provided.

Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission

fracfocus.org

====BRIEF MANUAL====

The above presentation has many interactive features:

You can click through the blocks on the top to see the slides.

Each slide has filters that can be set, e.g. to select individual or groups of operators. You can first click “all” to deselect all items. You have to click the “apply” button at the bottom to enforce the changes. After that, click anywhere on the presentation.

Tooltips are shown by just hovering the mouse over parts of the presentation.

You can move the map around, and zoom in/out.

By clicking on the legend you can highlight selected items, and include or exclude categories.

Note that filters have to be set for each tab separately.

The operator who currently owns the well is designated by “operator (current)”. The operator who operated a well in a past month is designated by “operator (actual)”. This distinction is useful when the ownership of a well changed over time.

If you have any questions on how to use the interactivity, or how to analyze specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.